Pascal wrote:
Hello Adriaan. Few years ago, Mac Pascal Interfaces were translated into Carbon-Ada. You can found them on www.macada.org http://www.macada.org. Basically Ada 2005 is supporting all modern object oriented paradigmes : classes as package + tagged record, multiple inheritance with interfaces (as Java), static and dynamic binding... Would be the translation of Cocoa Interfaces into Ada achievable? What would be necessary ? Anyway, I'm really interesting in "such thing like Objective-Ada" and contributing if I can help.
There are two possibilities.
The first one is to write a bridge in Ada, calling directly from Ada wrapper classes into the Objective-C runtime. An example in Pascal is given here http://wiki.freepascal.org/PasCocoa. More bridges are listed here http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?CocoaBridges. You don't need to extend the Ada language to write a bridge, but you may run into subtle problems with Cocoa.
The second one is to design and implement "Objective-Ada" as was done with e.g. Objective-Pascal http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_PasCocoa and Objective-Modula http://objective.modula2.net/. More languages are listed here http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?CocoaLanguages. This is the best solution. Next step is to auto-translate the Cocoa headers.
You can ask for help on the macpascal http://www.pascal-central.com/maillist.html mailing list.
Regards,
Adriaan van Os